The powerful video, posted on Twitter Thursday, was over two minutes long and featured players who each spoke a line about why they decided to sit out the anthems.
NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell announced this month the league has planned a series of social justice initiatives, including helmet decals, a voter activation push and phrases stenciled in the end zones.
“We need owners with influence and pockets bigger than ours,” players say in the Dolphins’ video. “And you fight for prison reform and innocent lives, and you repair the communities that were tossed to the side, and you admit you gained from it, and you swallowed your pride, and when greed is not the compass but the love is the guide, and when the courts don’t punish skin color, but punish the crime, until then, we’ll just skip the long production, and stay inside.”
The video concludes with the team’s head coach stating, “Before the media starts wondering and guessing, we just answered all your questions.
“We’ll just stay inside.”
NFL says it should have listened earlier
Over the summer, the NFL announced it would pledge $250 million over the next 10 years to help fight systemic racism and use its television network to raise awareness around social justice issues.
Last month, the commissioner said he wished the league would have “listened earlier” to Colin Kaepernick when the player began kneeling during the anthem to protest police brutality in 2016.
“It is not about the flag,” Goodell said. “These are not people who are unpatriotic.”
“What they were trying to do is exercise their right to bring attention to something that needs to get fixed. That misrepresentation of who they were and what they were doing was the thing that really gnawed at me.”
CNN’s Cesar Marin contributed to this report.